First big test for second-term team

John Kerry’s job is to make peace, but on Monday the nation’s top diplomat was the man tapped to issue the clarion call for an American strike on Syria.

“What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality,” Kerry said. “The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders, by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity.”

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In the first test of Obama’s second-term national security team’s stomach for war, gut-wrenching images of a chemical-weapons attack have turned even the least likely proponents for military action into a war council — or at least a limited-strike advisory group.

The hawk wing of Obama’s team — Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus — is long gone. They all lost the fight to get Obama to intercede on behalf of the Syrian rebels last year. But now their replacements are facing the harsh reality that sometimes America has little choice but to use its military.

Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, both shaped in part by their service in Vietnam and their later regrets about voting for the Iraq War, set a high bar for the use of force. “I think we need to be cautious with our power,” Hagel said at his confirmation hearing in which he spoke of having seen the “horror of war.”

The shift in personnel mirrored the president’s own reluctance to engage in more wars. And it seemed to be working — until Assad forced his hand.

The interventionists, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Rep. Samantha Power, are liberals known for favoring military force as a means for stopping genocide. They had been largely quiet on Syria until Monday night, when both women Tweeted about an impending American response.

Just over a year ago, Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and trigger a U.S. response, but left himself a little bit of wiggle room to look the other way if a small-scale chemical-weapons attack was isolated. When reports of Assad using chemical weapons first surfaced earlier this summer, Obama’s response was to announce an increase in aid to Syrian rebels — a boost that is not evident on the ground — rather than intervening directly. Everything the president said and did suggested that he just wanted the Syria problem to go away on its own.

But the most recent attack on Aug. 21 left Obama with little choice but to take stronger action, as the world accessed images of dying Syrians on the Internet.

Still, Obama appears to be taking the cautious approach to entanglements in the Middle East that has characterized both Kerry and Hagel in recent years. “Whatever judgments you make, they have to pass the test of whether or not, if you do them, they’re actually going to make things better,” Kerry told senators in January, explaining Obama’s hesitation in giving support to Syrian rebels.

Rice and Samantha Power, the liberal interventionists, have generally been publicly muted on Syria, after both separately called the United Nations’ failure to pass a mild rebuke of Syria earlier this summer a “disgrace that history will judge harshly.”

Late Monday, both Power and Rice again emerged on Twitter to echo Kerry’s tough talk earlier in the day. “No dispute in intl community that CW used in August 21 attack….” Rice tweeted. “Only regime has capacity to launch CW with rockets. US consulting with Congress & allies about how to respond to this indiscriminate use of CW.” Added Power: “Haunting images of entire families dead in their beds. Verdict is clear: Assad has used CWs against civilians in violation of int’l norm.”

If they entered their new roles expecting Obama to keep intervening as he did at their prodding in Libya, they now know what a tough sell that pitch really is, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon.

“The Rices and the Powers of the world realize they’re not really working for a humanitarian intervener,” O’Hanlon said. “We have a president who is fatigued by these operations, who senses that the country is fatigued by them, who would rather not do much with them and has probably overcorrected.”

But chemical weapons appear to have changed Obama’s calibration, if not his calculus.